Archive - Jun 2013

Overview of the great unwind, which I suggest has three components--tapering talk in the US, Japanese selling foreign assets and the liquidity squeeze in China (squeezing another carry carry trade).

In keeping with its firm Christian values, after Hong Kong slapped the US on one cheek yesterday when it allowed a passportless Snowden to leave the country for Moscow, the US has now turned the other cheek. And RUssia's Vladimir Putin was happy to oblige with a perfectly placed uppercut. As the WSJ reports, the Kremlin said Monday that it won't intervene in the case of former U.S. government contractor Edward Snowden and that Russia had no advance knowledge of his arrival from Hong Kong on Sunday. President Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that a decision about holding Mr. Snowden and sending him back to the U.S. to face charges wasn't a matter for the Kremlin."Snowden did nothing illegal in Russia. There are also no orders for his arrest through Interpol to Russian law enforcement agencies," an unnamed security official told the RIA-Novosti news agency." Of course, the NSA which is actively intercepting every Russian (and global) form of communication, knew all about this long ago...

The Shanghai Composite, which had largely been able to weather the recent dramatic shocks to both liquidity and the economy, finally threw in the towel and crashed. Moments ago the Shanghai Composite fell 5.5%, the biggest intraday slide since August 2009, and dropping below 2,000 for first time since December.

In the final section of this five-part series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4) on the dismal reality behind the non-recovery, David Stockman explains what lies ahead. He details in his new book 'The Great Deformation', that the mainstream notion that there is a choice between fiscal austerity and fiscal stimulus is wishful thinking. It does not recognize that owing to the triumph of crony capitalism and printing-press money America has become a failed state fiscally. What lies ahead is a continuous, mad-cap cycling back and forth - virtually on an odd-even day basis - between deficit cutting and fiscal stimulus to the GDP. As Stockman notes, the proximate cause of this recession waiting to happen is the federal government’s unfolding encounter with Peak Debt. The latter is not a magical statistical point such as a federal debt ratio of 100 percent of GDP, but a condition of permanent crisis - "no viable economy can survive on chronic fiscal deficits nor can it fail to save at a sufficient rate to fund a healthy level of investment in productive capital assets. The blithe assumption to the contrary which animates current policy rests on self-serving clichés such as “deficits don’t matter” and the Chinese savings glut." So the American economy faces a long twilight of no growth, rising taxes, and brutally intensifying fiscal conflict. These are the wages of five decades of Keynesian sin - the price of abandoning financial discipline.

Earlier we noted the rather peculiarly truthful (lack of optimistically-biased bullshit) annual report from the BIS as reading ZeroHedge-sermon-like. There is a smorgasbord of data, charts, and quotes strewn throughout the 204-page melodrama but one caught our eye. Reflecting on the fact that governments in several major economies currently benefit from historically low funding costs, and yet at the same time, rising debt levels have increased their exposure to higher interest rates, the BIS projects the dismal reality that any rise in interest rates without an equal increase in the output growth rate will further undermine fiscal sustainability. Although predicting when and how a correction in long-term rates will unfold is difficult, it is possible to examine the potential impact on the sustainability of public finances and how any normalization of rates (or Abe's success in creating 2% 'inflation' in Japan) leads the nation's debt-to-GDP ratio to explode to a surely-Krugman-mind-blowing 600% debt-to-GDP.

In 1996, demographers William Strauss and Neil Howe published the book The Fourth Turning. This study of generational cycles ("turnings") in America revealed predictable social trends that recur throughout history, and warned of a coming crisis (a "fourth turning") based on this research. Fourth turnings are defined by disorder and great changes brought on by a breakdown of the systems and operating principles that dominated the prior three turnings. "We cannot possibly afford the government we have promised ourselves. And, that will be a painful process of deleveraging, and it is not just deleveraging the explicit debt that we have already actually formally borrowed, it is all the implicit debt... No one simply solves a terrible problem on a sunny day when they can afford at least for the time being to look the other way. Problems like that are faced when people have no other choice, and it is a really grim day."

Following the 'coup' that led to JPMorgan's Matt Zames running the TBAC (and implicitly the US Treasury and Fed if one were inclined to believe that is where the real smarts are), it seems Goldman Sachs has once again been out-'vampire-squid'-ed as Jacob Frenkel - Chairman of JPMorgan Chase International - is set to take back the reins of the Bank of Israel. 

Housing price gains are outpacing fundamentals, as the median new home sale price relative to real disposable income has recent reached all-time high levels (higher than than the admitted bubble of the mid 2000s), and there are several regions around the US that are seeing simply stunning levels of exuberance with regard price changes. That leaves us asking - just which cities are the most bubble-prone? In order to answer that, Bloomberg has quantified the US cities with the most rapid growth in unemployment (not exactly supportive of home price excesses) coupled with the fastest rising prices. The answer - Yuma, Arizona (followed closely by Elmira, NY) is the most housing-bubble-prone city in the US.

In the real economy on Main Street, the circumstances are different. If you want to buy a house in the US and you need a conventional mortgage, and if you are not a speculator and want to live in dwelling, your costs have now risen substantially.

The Swiss Parliament basically told the US Department of Justice to fuck off.

From its origins as a management consulting firm, Booz Allen has quietly grown into a government-wide contracting behemoth, fed by ballooning post-Sept. 11 intelligence budgets and Washington’s increasing reliance on outsourcing. With 24,500 employees and 99% of its revenues from the federal government, its growth in the last decade has been stunning (and until very recently with little to no knowledge from the main street that it even exists).

Thanks to all.

"Can central banks now really do “whatever it takes”? As each day goes by, it seems less and less likely... Six years have passed since the eruption of the global financial crisis, yet robust, self-sustaining, well balanced growth still eludes the global economy. If there were an easy path to that goal, we would have found it by now. Monetary stimulus alone cannot provide the answer because the roots of the problem are not monetary.  Many large corporations are using cheap bond funding to lengthen the duration of their liabilities instead of investing in new production capacity...Continued low interest rates and unconventional policies have made it easy for the government to finance deficits, and easy for the authorities to delay needed reforms in the real economy and in the financial system... Overindebtedness is one of the major barriers on the path to growth after a financial crisis. Borrowing more year after year is not the cure...in some places it may be difficult to avoid an overall reduction in accommodation because some policies have clearly hit their limits." - Bank of International Settlements

A message to Mr Holder...